Today, where water usually stands along the river’s banks in New Orleans, mud cracks in the sun. It’s a challenge that begins hundreds of miles north, where water levels have been recorded at 30-year lows in some areas due to a monthslong drought across the U.S. heartland.
The result is a logistical emergency for waterborne trade, but also a new impetus to better understand this massive watershed and what humans can do to safeguard it in a time of flux. Some barges have run aground attempting to navigate its shallow waters. The Army Corp of Engineers is dredging to keep channels open. And in recent days, rains have begun to lift the water levels in key areas.
This is a time to think about making the river “more resilient,” says Clint Willson, an expert in river hydraulics at Louisiana State University.
Why We Wrote This
Water levels in the Mississippi River fell far below normal this autumn. Recent rains are starting to allow freight to flow more freely. But questions remain about how to manage the river for resilience.
That can mean continued investment in infrastructure and research, and managing water in a way that’s functional for both the river and its surrounding communities.
“I never say we control the river,” Professor Willson says. “We’re trying to manage the river. When you manage something, you’re using your experiences, your knowledge.”
The exposure of the Mississippi River’s dry banks makes it look vulnerable, laid bare as a result of a monthslong drought across the U.S. heartland. In normal conditions, the river’s tributaries would help feed the historically reliable flow of its water for more than 2,300 miles as the river carves its way from its headwaters in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico’s emerald-green surface.
But today, where water usually stands along the river’s banks in New Orleans, mud cracks in the sun. It’s a challenge that begins hundreds of miles north, where water levels have been recorded at 30-year lows in some parts of the lower Mississippi region that stretches from southern Illinois to the Louisiana coast.
The result is a logistical emergency for waterborne trade, but also a new impetus to better understand this massive watershed and what humans can do to safeguard and manage it in a time of flux. Nature is resilient, but the predicament here shows even the biggest of inland waterways can’t be taken for granted.
Why We Wrote This
Water levels in the Mississippi River fell far below normal this autumn. Recent rains are starting to allow freight to flow more freely. But questions remain about how to manage the river for resilience.
This is a time to think about making the river “more resilient,” says Clint Willson, an expert in Mississippi River hydraulics and professor at Louisiana State University.
“I never say we control the river. We’re trying to manage the river. When you manage something, you’re using your experiences, your knowledge. That relies so much upon what experiences have you had.”
One experience recently has been the disruption of global trade. More than 500 million tons of cargo travels the Mississippi annually, according to estimates from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. That includes food grown in the Midwest for global and domestic consumption, energy byproducts, and more. And for weeks, the river’s low water levels have narrowed the shipping lanes carrying those products toward the coast. Some barges have run aground attempting to navigate its shallow waters.
Amid AccuWeather estimates that the total economic damage could get as high as $20 billion, recent days have brought signs of improvement in water levels at key points such as Memphis, Tennessee.
Interacting with nature
The Mississippi River predicament is not solely a climate change story. It’s about continued investment in infrastructure and research, or a lack thereof. It’s also about the concept of managing water in a way that’s functional for both the river and its surrounding communities, say experts like Professor Willson.
In many ways, south Louisiana is a laboratory for that understanding.
Here, the historically low freshwater levels have allowed saltwater to encroach into the river’s Gulf mouth. At stake as a result is the drinking water supply for communities that draw from the river, like New Orleans and surrounding localities, and water treatment plants unequipped for saltwater influx, says Heath Jones, chief of emergency management at the Army Corp’s New Orleans District.
While not always as bad as this year, he says it’s a cyclical problem that this district observes about once a decade.
In studying the impacts of channel deepening, researchers at the Army Corps realized the need to construct a sill – an underwater levee, as Mr. Jones describes it – designed to obstruct saltwater intrusion. Due to the density of saltwater, the underwater barrier essentially creates a bridge to move freshwater.
“Without the sill there, there would be a threat” to communities’ drinking water, Mr. Jones says.
But combating nature’s cycles remains a learning process, he adds. “Every time we have these events, we get more empirical data that says we’re doing this right, or we could improve on it.”
Part of that learning process is understanding historical trends.
Upmanu Lall, an engineering professor at Columbia University and the director of the university’s Water Center, worries that the race to combat climate change clouds that process.
Stephen Smith/AP
“It’s a double-edged sword,” he says.
On one hand, the urgency around climate change is vital for the public’s future. On the other, climate alarmism has the potential to distract from basic preparation activities.
“If you look at the spending on climate change, it’s all directed toward decarbonization, which is important,” Dr. Lall says. “But even if we successfully decarbonize, these extreme climate events happen – and we still do not have enough of a strategy to do something about them.”
Dr. Lall points to the drinking water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, as an example of how underinvesting in infrastructure exacerbates the impacts of extreme weather that scientists attribute partly to the effects of human-caused climate change.
For decades Jackson’s tax base withered, and chronic underinvestment allowed the city’s public drinking water system to fall into disrepair. In recent years, boil water notices became a norm for residents. This past summer, severe flooding impacted Jackson’s water system’s pumps. The pumps failed, leaving Jackson residents without safe drinking water for weeks.
In the end, Dr. Lall, whose academic research on the impacts of global warming dates back more than four decades, worries climate change took more blame than the city’s aging infrastructure.
“The reason this becomes a problem is that we lose sight of the fact that there’s a bunch of things that we need to be paying attention to that are not necessarily climate related,” he says.
“We are not doing that.”
Last week, the U.S. Justice Department won a federal judge’s approval for a third-party manager to oversee reforms to Jackson’s water system.
“Hopefully that helps raise awareness”
There are only so many ways technology can control the Mississippi River, researchers admit.
To combat traffic jams along the river’s shipping lanes, the Army Corp of Engineers has begun dredging parts of the river, effectively deepening sections to allow for barges to travel through.
However, the options for how to alleviate the situation largely end there. Without rain, that is. The good news is that in recent days some replenishment from rainfall has occurred, notably in the key area around Memphis. While water levels are still far from typical, they are now more than 10 feet higher than in mid-October – which saw lows not seen since 1988.
If there’s anything to be gained, Professor Willson hopes it’s clarity for the public on what the Mississippi River means for a functioning society. He hopes that the river’s recent struggles allow the opportunity for more to understand the river’s power. Not just from an extreme weather point of view, such as those who venture out to its banks after heavy rainfall to witness the mighty river’s flow. But from the understanding that the river is a binding force globally.
“Hopefully that helps raise awareness and people’s understanding of the importance of the river,” Professor Willson says.